Welcome Lecture

	Jae Chun CHOE (Ewha Womans University, Korea) Lecture Date & Time: May 28 (Tue) 14:40-15:30, Room 121~123, Exhibition Center 2 Title: Living a contented life as a biologist

[Biography]
Jae Choe received his PhD in Biology under the guidance of E. O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler at Harvard University and taught at the University of Michigan and Seoul National University. He is currently a Distinguished Chair Professor at Ewha University. He has served as the President of the Ecological Society of Korea, President of Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), UNFCCC NAP Ambassador, Co-President of Climate Change Center, and the Founding Director of National Institute of Ecology. He is currently serving as the President of the Biodiversity Foundation established with the help of Jane Goodall. He is an associate editor of Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology and on editorial board of Evolutionary Psychology, Frontiers in Behavioral and Evolutionary Biology, Ecological Research, Journal of Ethology, and Journal of Insect Behavior. In addition to publishing nearly 150 scientific papers and 5 books in English, he has written or translated more than 70 books in Korean and given numerous public lectures. Most recently, he worked as the Editor-in-Chief for the Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior (published in 2019 by Academic Press) and joined the editorial board of a highly acclaimed International Review of Science, Inference. He is also running an Youtube channel called ‘Jae Chun Choe’s Amazon’.

Plenary Lecture

	Charles M. Rice (The Rockefeller University, USA) Lecture Date & Time: May 29 (Wed) 11:15-12:05, Auditorium Title: A cure for hepatitis C, now what?

[Biography]
Dr. Rice is the Maurice R. and Corinne P. Greenberg Chair in Virology and serves as Head of the Laboratory for Virology and Infectious Disease at The Rockefeller University. He is one of the world’s most accomplished virologists and a prominent figure in research on members of the Flaviviridae including hepatitis C virus (HCV).
Dr. Rice received his bachelor’s degree from University of California Davis in 1974 and earned his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1981. From 1986-2000, Dr. Rice was a faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis. His research team has helped to understand the biogenesis and structure of HCV-encoded proteins, discovered a highly conserved RNA element at the 3’ terminus of HCV genome RNA, and produced the first infectious molecular clone of the virus—an essential tool for future studies on this important human pathogen. His laboratory has established cell culture systems and animal models for studying HCV replication and evaluating antiviral efficacy.
Dr. Rice has co-authored over 500 articles in the field of virology, serves as a reviewer for numerous journals, is a past President of the American Society for Virology, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and a recipient of the M. W. Beijernick, Dautrebande, Robert Koch, InBev Baillet-Latour prizes, the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award (with Ralf Bartenschlager and Michael Sofia), and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (with Harvey Alter and Michael Houghton).

	Chen Dong (Tsinghua University, China) Lecture Date & Time: May 29 (Wed) 14:30-15:20, Auditorium Title: Regulation of T cell-mediated immunity in cancer

[Biography]
Dr. Dong is Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine and Director for the Shanghai Immune Therapy Institute, as well as a principal investigator at the Institute for Immunology at Tsinghua University. Dr. Dong served as a Professor of Immunology and the Director of the Center for inflammation and Cancer at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center before his move to China, and also was Dean of Tsinghua University School of Medicine in 2016-2020.
Dr. Dong’s research is to understand the molecular mechanisms whereby immune and inflammatory responses are normally regulated, and to apply this knowledge to the understanding and treatment of infection, autoimmunity and allergy disorders as well as cancer. The work from Dr. Dong’s group has led to the discoveries of Th17 and T follicular helper (Tfh) cell subsets in the immune system and elucidation of their biological and pathological functions.  
Dr. Dong has over 200 publications and was rated highly cited researcher for seven times. The honors he has received include the 2009 American Association of Immunologists-BD Bioscience Investigator Award and 2019 International Cytokine and Interferon Society Biolegend-William E. Paul Award. He is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the advancement of Science and the Chinese Academy of Medicine. He is currently co-editor-in-chief for Current Opinion in Immunology and hLife, Editor-in-chief for Frontiers in Immunology- T Cell Biology, Executive Associate Editor for China Sciences- Life Sciences, Associate Editor for Advances in Immunology, and an Editor for Annual Review of Immunology and Immunity, and a Scientific Advisor for Med. 

	Randy Schekman (University of California, Berkeley, USA) Lecture Date & Time: May 30 (Thu) 14:30-15:20, Auditorium Title: Exosomes and the Traffic of Proteins and RNA between Cells

[Biography]
Dr. Randy Schekman is a Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  He studied the enzymology of DNA replication as a graduate student with Arthur Kornberg at Stanford University.  His current interest in cellular membranes developed during a postdoctoral period with S. J. Singer at the UC Diego.  Among his awards are the Gairdner International Award, the Albert Lasker Award in Basic Medical Research and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with James Rothman and Thomas Südhof. He served as the Editor of the Annual Reviews of Cell and Developmental Biology and as Editor-in-Chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and eLife. Schekman leads an effort supported by the Sergey Brin Family Foundation to identify and support basic research on the mechanisms of Parkinson’s Disease initiation and progression (https://parkinsonsroadmap.org).

Schekman’s laboratory investigates the mechanism of vesicular traffic in the secretory pathway in eukaryotic cells. Currently the lab investigates the mechanism of biogenesis of extracellular vesicles including how small RNAs are sorted for secretion in exosomes and the means by which these vesicles are internalized and function in target cells.

	Shelley Berger (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Lecture Date & Time: May 30 (Thu) 15:30-16:20, Auditorium Title: Epigenetics of Learning and Memory in Aging

[Biography]
I am the “Penn Integrates Knowledge” Daniel S. Och University Professor at University of Pennsylvania (Penn), in Cell & Developmental Biology and Genetics \in the Perelman School of Medicine (PSOM), and in Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences.  I am founding and current Director of the Epigenetics Institute in the PSOM, an internationally respected faculty group working on chromatin and epigenetics. I am an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, American Association of Cancer Research, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and, in 2022, Academy of Healthspan and Lifespan Research. My laboratory studies chromatin and epigenetic regulation of the eukaryotic genome, focusing on post translational modifications of histone proteins and transcription factors, and we discovered numerous chromatin enzymes and addressed fundamental questions of mechanisms in modifying histones and DNA binding activators in transcription, findings that have contributed to the explosion in broad interest in epigenetics in biomedical research. In recent years we are increasingly focused on mammalian biology and human diseases, including cancer and Alzheimer’s disease associated with aging, and epigenetic control of learning and memory in mammals and complex social behavior in the ant model system. We have published nearly 250 papers and reviews.

I have >30 years of experience in mentoring and training graduate students and postdoctoral fellows as a faculty member. I have/am training 22 graduate students and 44 postdoctoral fellows, now successful in careers in academia, pharmaceutical industry, scientific writing, and teaching. I am focused on improving academic training for graduate students and postdocs; in 2022/2023 I initiated and am now co-leading a Working Group for the Advisory Committee to the NIH Director, to “Re-envision Postdoctoral Training in US Biomedicine”. I received the 2016 Penn Biomedical Postdoctoral Programs Distinguished Mentor Award and 2017 Award for Faculty Mentoring Undergraduate Research. I am active in multiple graduate groups, including Cell and Molecular Biology, Pharmacology, Biology, Biochemistry/Biophysics, and Neuroscience. In graduate education, I have done extensive teaching, including creating BIO/CAMB 394 “Epigenetics of Human Health and Disease, and contributing to other courses including serving as the Course director for the core course CAMB 555 for 2 years, and teaching in that course for 10 years. I have served as a formal mentor for three medical fellows who have pursued basic research related to their clinical interests and one post-bac student through the Penn-PREP program. I regularly host summer undergraduates and high school students in my laboratory, through the U Penn SUIP program and other formal and informal programs. In addition to hosting trainees from underrepresented and/or disadvantaged backgrounds through the Penn-PREP program and the U Penn SUIP program, I participate in recruitment of these trainees through speaking engagements, including at SACNAS (2019).

We have extensive research experience in mammalian neuroepigenetics, including our work profiling histone modifications in human post-mortum brain (Nativio et al., Nature Neuroscience 2018; Nativio et al. Nature Genetics 2020). Here we discovered altered histone acetylation sites, both reduced levels of certain sites and increased levels of other sites, which have profound implications for aging and Alzheimer’s disease. Our current unpublished research on mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease demonstrates a key role of ACSS2, generating acetyl-CoA in the cell nucleus, and expressed in hippocampus. In new observations, we find that loss of ACSS2 causes severe memory loss in the AD background, whereas, excitingly, high expression of ACSS2 ameliorates pathology and cognitive deficits in the mouse AD model.

	Robert Lefkowitz (Duke University, USA) Lecture Date & Time: May 31 (Fri) 09:00-09:50, Room 205 Title: A Brief History of GPCRs and ACRs (Arrestin Coupled Receptors)

[Biography]
Dr. Robert Lefkowitz is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator who has spent most of his 50+ -year research career at the Duke University Medical Center. He and Brian Kobilka, a post-doctoral fellow in Lefkowitz’s lab in the 1980s, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2012. Lefkowitz is a Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry, and a Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Medicine. He is also a basic research cardiologist at the Duke Heart Center. He has been an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1976, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Other awards include the National Medal of Science, the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine, and the Canada Gairdner International Award.

Ilchun Plenary Lecture

	Joseph R. Ecker (Salk Institute for Biological Studies, USA) Lecture Date & Time: May 31 (Fri) 10:00-10:50, Room 205 Title: Toward a Human Body Single-Cell Epigenomic Atlas

[Biography]
Dr. Ecker is a molecular biologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he is the International Council Chair in Genetics, Director of the Genomic Analysis Laboratory, and an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His work focuses on epigenomics in plants, mice, and humans, focusing on the brain. His lab studies DNA methylation through development, and as part of the BRAIN initiative and has developed a single-cell epigenomic cell atlas of the mouse brain.

Previously Dr. Ecker’s lab created the first detailed map of the human epigenome using a method his lab developed called MethylC-Seq. He has served as a member of the council of advisors to the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH and the US Department of Energy and Agriculture, among others.  Ecker is a member of the US National Academies of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. His work has been recognized with a number of awards, including the George W. Beadle Award from the Genetics Society of America and the John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science from the National Academy of Science.